Medical writing: Basics

[Guest guest]

Hi,

Scientific journals are of two types. Hard copy and E-journals. E-journals are of recent origin and in economically developing countries still not fancied. Couple of years back when I faced an interview and spoke about my E-publications, the interviewers were not interested and insisted that I showed them hard copy reprints.

Advantages of written communication:

Easy to create record, easy to retrieve, can be read at own time, can be stored and passed on, can be photocopied.

There are no short cuts

In medical writing all have to go through the hard way of learning. Practice, practice and practice. It is perfect practice which leads to sucess. If one does not learn well and keeps practicing imperfectly, the result will be imperfection! Thus it is a teaching-learning process accompanied by perfect practice which delivers the fruits in terms of higher success rate in terms of publications. There have been no short cuts and there will be none. None wins without hard work.

Space is limited and costly

During early formative years none should get dejected by rejection of manuscripts from the journal. It happens, till we learn the art of writing. Remember that write well, timely and to the point. The ABC of writing is:

Accuracy

Brevity

Clarity

It is absolutely necessary that these rules are followed because journals do not like very long write-ups like dissertations because journal space is limited and costly.

Junk is unlimited

Quality medical journals have a higher rejection rate because most of the contributions are not upto the standard. None from my generation underwent any training in medical writing. We had to face many rejections before we learnt the skills and then improved upon. Beleive me, even at this age of 55 years sometimes our manuscripts are rejected! The journals have to filter the material because journal space is limited and junk is unlimited.

Dr Vijay Thawani